Cold Noodles ( Mee Yain ) So Ba

Another Japanese influence, as Thailand gets richer, so people want to try new things. This is a popular dish in Thailand, originating from Japan, it is a dish of cold noodles with a raw quails egg and side flavorings such as radish and wasabi. The noodles are the plain center of the meal that carries the flavours.
Her I've used squid ink noodles that have a wonderful smell of squid as you boil them which I like, but wholewheat egg noodles are more authentic. Thais tend to add sliced meat and sliced omelet and serve the noodles, which is not authentic and spoils the simplicity of the dish.
A lot of this dish is about the eating process, each person individually mixes their own dipping sauce to their own preference, and the cold noodles become the central shared communal food. A social food, that establishes social hierarchy and bonds - who gets the noodles first, who takes the most, who signals who to eat first. and so on.
The dipping sauce is Soba Tsuyu, which is 50-50 Mirin and Light Soy. Miring is a sweet rice wine, the Mirin adds the sweetness, the soy adds the salt and flavour. You can also get ready made sauces for noodles, known as Soba Tsuyu. If you can't get it, don't worry, a sweetened soy sauce works perfectly well.

Preparation
1. Boil the water and add the noodles, it's easy enough to tell if noodles are cooked, just take one out, break it open and look to see it's cooked inside. Once it's cooked, rinse in cold water until they are completely cold. A dip in some ice water can finish the cooling process if you don't have cold water.
2. Grate the radish, it's nice to have strands of radish that give texture and make it easier to pick up with chopsticks, rather than a mush. So be careful when grating, drag the radish slowly over the full length of the grater and it will grate long strands of the radish.
3. Chop the spring onions finely, mix with the radish strands.
4. Cut open the raw quails egg and place it upright standing in its shell, in the radish/spring onion mix. You can see this top right of my photograph.
5. Pile loops of the noddles on the place. Put some tin slices of seaweed paper on the top of the noodles to dress them.
6. Serve piles of the cold noodles, with the Soba Tsuyu sauce (the Mirin/Soy mix) in a separate bowl, the radish/spring onion and the raw egg in a separate bowl, and an empty bowl for each person to assembly their own personal dipping sauce in.

Eating
Each person has their own little bowl, and takes some of the mirin/soy sauce in the bowl, mixes in the raw quails egg, and mixes in some of the wasabi, according to their personal tastes. This becomes their personal dipping bowl.
They then take a mouthful of the noodles with chopsticks and dip those into their bowl to add flavour and eat. Interspersing the noodles with some of the onion radish mix to freshen the palate.
In the Thai variant, slices of cold meat cuts are also dipped in the sauce and eaten, sort of noodles, then meat, then freshen palate with radish, then noodles, then meat, then freshen palate...noodles, meat, radish...